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THE EDITION OF THIS BOOK IS LIMITED TO 
FIVE HUNDRED COPIES. EACH COPY HAS, AS 
FRONTISPIECE, AN ORIGINAL SIGNED PROOF 
ETCHING BY J. ANDRE SMITH, ENTITLED "AT 
CHARTEVES." THIS ETCHING WILL NOT BE 
ISSUED IN ANY OTHER FORM 



IN FRANCE WITH THE 
AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES 



■''■^^"iH'^^^^ '"PljT " 




^yUi,;U,i 



AT CHARTEVES 



INFRANCEWITH 
THE'AMERICAN 
EXPEDITIONARY 
FORCES 





DRAWIISGS BY 
J-ANDRE-SMITH 




ARTHURHHAHLO-SCOPUBLISHERS 
N9569 FIFTH-AVENUE-NEW-YORK 






COPYRIGHT, 1919 
BY J. ANDRE SMITH 

Published December. 1919 



Drawings Numbers ?, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11,, iz, ij, 14, ly, 16, 18, 19 
10, 22, 2j, 24, 25, 25, 27, 28, 29. JO, J2, H, J4, IS, J6, n, 41, 44 
46,47,49, ;o, 52, 5J, 54, 55, 57,58, 59 51,52,64, 65,66,67.5s 
70, 71, 72, 76, 78, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98 
and 99 are copyrighlcd bv the Committee on Public Information 



©CU566408 
m -7 1920 



^0 



-6135^ 



/ 



^/ -- 



PUBLISHER'S NOTE 

The majority of the drawings in this book are the property of the United 

States Government and form a part of the Government's official records of 

the Great War. Their publication here has been authorized by the Historical 

Branch of the War Department. Mr. J. Andre Smith was commissioned as 

Captain in the Engineer Corps and was the first of eight artists appointed 

by the Government to be sent to France in order to record the activities of 

our Expeditionary Forces. Mr. Smith attended the first Officers' Training 

Camp at Plattsburgh in 191 7. He was commissioned as First Lieutenant in 

the Engineer Section of the Officers' Reserve Corps and for three months 

served in Washington in connection with the organization of the first 

Camouflage companies. Following this period, he was stationed at Camp 

American University with Company B, 40th Engineers, Camouflage. It was 

while he was on duty with this organization that he received his 

appointment as one of the Government's official artists; 

he was sent to France in February, 191 7. The 

notes that accompany these drawings 

were written especially 

for this book by 

Mr. Smith. 



:i- 



TO 

MAJOR GENERAL 
WILLIAM M. BLACK 

CHIEF OF ENGINEERS 
UNITED STATES ARMY 



FOREWORD 




HEN a war poses for its picture, it leaves to the 
artist the selection of the attitude in which the 
artist may desire to draw it. And this attitude 
is the artist's point of view circumscribed by the 
boundaries of his ability and the nature of the 
work forwhich his training andpracticehavefitted 
him. The model itself exacts no hmitations; it is 
generous beyond all measure. It will sit with 
hands folded for those who wish it to, or it will 
strut with clanking sword, or pose as the mother 
of mercy, or the invading barbarian, or the val- 
iant hero, or the cringing coward, or, better yet, 
a composite of all these enveloped in a fury of sound and sight and horror 
as the two elements that form its existence crash again and again in their 
fiendish efforts to destroy each other and restore a world to peace. Here, 
then, is a varied selection, ranging from the sentimentalist who pictures 
"The Girl He Left Behind," to the realist who shows you four years of 
war's terrors crowded into a cubic acre of land, sea and air. 

This "World War," which has just been ended officially with the signing 
of the peace treaty, was a double war; the first lasted only a few weeks and 
ended when, after the battle of the Marne and the German retreat, both 
forces were so exhausted that they had just strength enough to submerge 
themselves below the surface of the earth and glare at each other. Up to 
this point the war was an old-fashioned war, and with the Germans, so old- 
fashioned in fact that in its accomplishment of unspeakable horrors it out- 
did the efforts of the most barbarous barbarians. The second war was a 
trench war, and although it was none the less fierce, it was in comparison 
with this first murderous invasion a cool, business-like undertaking. There 
was, too, one other difi^erence, and it was a vast one. It made soldiering 
everybody's business; whereas the first war was a conflict between profes- 
sional warriors, the second marked the entrance of the fighting civilian. 

During the first few months of this mad conflict the war had not had 
time to grow self-conscious. It was not until it had settled into trenches, 
recovered its breath, put on new uniforms and steel helmets, used gas, dropped 
bombs and felt reasonably sure of being something greater and more 
destructive and more expensive than anything in the world's histor\^ did 
it become fully conscious of its importance and call upon an astounded and 
shocked world to come and regard it. And so it happened that the journalists 
or war correspondents, who at one time were the only "outsiders" to enjoy 
orchestra seats in the theatre of war, were now being crowded by the arrival 
of novelists, poets, historians, propagandists, artists, sculptors, photogra- 
phers, and moving-picture men (not to mention a liberal scattering of mis- 
cellaneous scientists). All these spectators were allowed to view this "Big 



Show," record it, picture it, criticise it, and glorify it under the sanction 
of governments that made them their official, semi-official, or unofficial 
representatives. And between those who actually fought in the war and 
will record it, and those who stood on the edge of the fight and will record 
it, and those who were not anywhere near the war and will record it, this 
tremendous self-conscious struggle of Autocracy against Democracy is sure 
to go on record in full detail to form the pages of a history which future 
generations will probably regard as a record of unbelievable events. 

My contribution to this vast storage of war records is slight. War posed 
for me in the attitude of a very deliberate worker who goes about his task 
of fighting in a methodical and thorough manner. If the picture of war 
which the sum total of my drawings shows has any virtue of truth or 
novelty it is in this respect: It shows War, the business man, instead of 
War, the warrior. It is an unsensational record of things actually seen, 
and in almost every instance drawn, as the saying is, "on the spot." The 
drawings cover a wide area of the work of our Expeditionary Forces in 
France and picture our activities from our ports of debarkation along the 
line of our Services of Supplies, over many of our battlefields, and through 
Luxembourg into Germany and across the Rhine. Of the many sketches that 
I made for the War Department's official war records, I have selected for 
this volume only those which show, as nearly as possible, our various Army 
activities that came to my notice during the year in which I served with 
the A. E. F. as one of its official artists. The searcher after sensational 
pictures of conflict, the horrors of war, and the anecdotic record of soldier 
life and heroism will not find these subjects here. My drawings show merely 
the background of the A. E. F. 

J. Andre Smith. 

New York, July, 191 9. 



LIST OF DRAWINGS 

1 . ON THE \\ 'HAR VES AT ST. NAZA IRE 

'2 . THE BASIN AT ST. NAZAIRE 

■ 3 . A LOCOMOTIVE SHOP AT ST. NAZAIRE 

A . NANTES 

'5 . A VIEW OF CHAUMONT 

,6 . A DISTANT VIEW OF G. H. Q. 

7 . AN AVIATION FIELD 

■ 8 . A ROAD AT THE FRONT 

■9 . AN ARTILLERY POSITION AT PEXONNE 

■10 . A CHOW LINE 

■11 .A BILLET IN PEXONNE 

12 . A VIEW OF LANGRES 

13 . AVIEWOFNEUFCHATEAU 

14 . AT MENIL-LA-TOUR 

15 . A VIEW FROM THE TERRACE AT BOUCQ 

16 . WAGONS AND TENTS 

17 . A VIEW OF BEAUMONT 

18 . RUINS IN RAMBUCOURT 

19 . A COMPANY BILLET 

20 . AN ARMY KITCHEN 

21 . THE BILLET BEAUTIFUL 

22 . A SADDLER'S ROOM 

23 . A BARRACK STREET 

24 . A MONASTERY BILLET 

25 . "LAME DUCKS" 

26 . A RE PA IR SHOP A T IS SO UD UN 

27 . A GATEWAY TO THE FRONT 

28 . AN AMERICAN GRAVEYARD 

29 . AN UNSAFE BILLET IN RAMBUCOURT 

30 . THE SHELTER OF A CHURCH 

31 . A RAILHEAD DUMP 

32 . A REGIMENT AT MESS 

33 . ATNEVERS 

34 . ASSEMBLING LIBERTY PLANES 

35 . AT THE CAMOUFLAGE FACTORY 



LIST OF DRAWINGS 

36 . SAUMUR 

37 . IN THE SALVAGE DEPOT AT ST. PIERRE-DES-CORPS 
'38 . AEARM AT SAVENAY 

'39 . A REFRIGERATING PLANT 

'40 . AN OBSERVATION BALLOON 

41 . IN REHERRY 

42 . A HOUSE IN BADONVILLER 

43 . AT MONTDIDIER 

44 . A BASE HOSPITAL 

45 . CANTIGNY 
.46 . CRASHED 

■47 . A MOTOR TRAIN CONCEALED 

.48 . A REGIMENTAL HEADQUARTERS 

'49 . A WOOD ENCAMPMENT 

50 . IN BELLE AU WOOD 

■51 . AN ADVANCE DRESSING STATION 

52 . A BELLE AU FARM 

'53 . LUCY-LA-BOCAGE 

■54 . TORCY 

•55 . BOURESCHES 

■ 56 . VAUX 

:57 . A ROLL CALL AFTER BATTLE 

,58 . REGIMENTAL HEADQUARTERS AT GRAND BALLIOS 

59 . A VIEW OF CHATEAU-THIERRY 

60 . THE BRIDGE AT CHATEAU-THIERRY 

61 . GERMAN SHELTERS 

62 . A BRIDGE AT J A ULGONNE 

63 . THE SECOND BATTLE OF THE MARNE 

64 . WHERE THE GERMANS CROSSED THE MARNE 

65 . A VIEW OF MEZY 

66 . A MOBILE HOSPITAL 

67 . A CORNER IN ESSEY 

68 . RAMBUCOURT 

69 . BEYOND SEICHEPREY 

70 . OVER NO-MAN'S LAND 



LIST OF DRAWINGS 

' 71 . FLIREY 

72 . THE CROSS-ROADS AT FLIREY 

, 73 . NO-MAN'S LAND REGAINED 

^74 . A ROAD IN MONT SEC 

, 75 . ON THE ROAD TO THIAUCOURT 

, 76 . THIAUCOURT 

.77 . A SALVAGE DEPOT AT THE FRONT 

, 78 . PONT-A-MOUSSON 

, 79 . KEMMEL 

^80 . BELLICOURT 

^ 81 . SAINT QUENTIN CANAL 

82 . A STRETCH OF FLANDERS 

83 . AUDENARD 

84 . VERDUN 

85 . A WINDOW IN VERDUN 

86 . THE ARGONNE COUNTRY 

87 . VARENNES 
,88 . ST.JUVIN 

89 . GRAND PRE 

90 . A DUMP AT DUN-SUR-MEUSE 

91 . A MINE CRATER 

92 . DUN-SUR-MEUSE 

93 . A FIELD ENCAMPMENT 

94 . A VIEW OF LUXEMBOURG 

95 . ON THE MOSELLE 

96 . ECHTERNACH 

97 . A CORNER IN BREMM 

98 . A VIEW OF MONTABAUR 

99 . COBLENZ 

100 . CROSSING THE RHINE 



ON THE WHARVES AT ST. NAZAIRE 

THE American soldier who, on landing in France, expected to find him- 
self among utterly strange surroundings was sure to be disappointed, 
pleasantly, or otlierwise, according to the degree of romance in his 
make-up. He landed not in a French atmosphere but into an Americanized 
zone of hustle, with merely a mellow foreign background. From the deck 
of the transport or the lighter that took him ashore he looked down upon 
familiar looking figures in khaki, and more especially into the grinning black 
faces of the men of our stevedore regiments from 'way down South, a happy- 
go-lucky, semi-military crowd, who sang and joked at their work and made 
you feel that perhaps, after all, you had not been separated by 
three thousand miles of subs from "God's Own Country." 

[i] 



THE BASIN AT ST. NAZAIRE 

OF the several American ports in France, St. Nazaire was the most 
active. The narrow locks which separated the ocean from the basin 
and ship berths were constantly opening to admit huge transports 
with their "seven men a minute" or the continuous flow of paint-bedazzled 
freighters. Inside the basin there was a constant pulsation of business, 
accompanied by the noises of unloading, the crash of machinery, the hiss 
and puffing of steam cranes, the rumble of freight cars and this whole melody 
of work enriched by an undertone of sing-song and chanting from the irre- 
pressible stevedores of our sunny South. And everywhere could be seen our 
men in khaki or in their labor "uniforms" of blue denim. It was indeed hard 
to believe that this was not America; in fact, an Americanized France rimmed 
these ship berths, extended itself along miles of railroad tracks, into gigantic 
warehouses, and spread itself here and there into 
the suburbs of France. 

[2] 



A LOCOMOTIVE SHOP AT ST. NAZAIRE 

AT St. Nazaire, near the closed end of the basin, were two shops for the 
assembling of locomotives, both of them huge French steel and glass 
^ structures that were given over to our needs. Near them, a gigantic 
crane would reach into the hold of a freighter, and swing onto waiting flat 
cars, packing cases as large as a bungalow and containing the unassembled 
makings of an American locomotive. These crates would be rolled into the 
shops and with Yank-power and crane-power be torn open with a rapidity 
that makes the pictorial recording of this part of the work a more fitting task 
for the "movie" man than the draftsman. With hardly less speed was the 
rest of the work carried on. In this shop we had room for as many as eight 
locomotives, and under the rush of day and night shifts, I was told that as 
many as eighteen of these iron monsters had been turned out in twentj^-four 
hours, fully equipped, including the enraged high-pitched French locomotive 
whistle which, for some unknown reason, the French insisted upon our using, 
and which so persistently called forth the profane 
jeers of the doughboy. 



NANTES 

THE problem of unloading our freight and food supplies, and all the 
paraphernaha of war that we would require to maintain an army which 
some day might number four million men, was one that gave our 
engineers and transportation officers occasion for ponderous thought and 
considerable figuring. With the estabhshment of the three major ports at 
Brest, St. Nazaire and Bordeaux, with their piers and vast storage houses, 
and together with a few minor ports to act as overflows, this difficult matter 
was admirably settled. One of these lesser unloading grounds was at Nantes 
on the Loire, not far from St. Nazaire. This drawing shows the river 
front, looking up stream along the string of ship berths. 

[4] 



A VIEW OF CHAUMONT 

IT was not always our good fortune, in our selection of places for our head- 
quarters, to find towns that were as attractive as Chaumont. Although 
the place is small and one could traverse its streets in a morning's walk, 
it has a dignity of architecture, and a distinct quahty of ancient loveliness 
which is not often found in towns in this quarter of France. This drawing 
gives one an idea of the plateau on which the town is built, and the hne of 
houses that marks the location of the old city walls. The French barrack 
buildings which housed the extensive offices of our General Headquarters 
are on a spur of high ground to the west of the center of the town, 
and are to the left, but beyond the boundaries of this picture. 

[5] 



A DISTANT VIEW OF G. H. Q. 

THE French casernes, or barracks, showed little variety in plan or archi- 
tecture. A sHght difference in building material and the size of the 
general layout were about all that one could distinguish in a trip across 
France. And so, the description of the offices of our General Headquarters 
at Chaumont would apply equally well to the various other barracks that 
housed our lesser headquarters: A rectangular drill ground with buildings of 
three stories and a mansard roof flanking three sides of it, while the fourth 
was shut off from the street by a wall or iron fence and symmetrically placed 
guard houses. Add to this the pleasant sight of the French and American 
flags, side by side, that marked the entrance gates, the guards with the ever- 
snappy salute, and perhaps a fringe of trees along the three sides of the open 
square, and you have a standard picture of our barrack headquarters. This 
drawing shows the buildings of G. H. Q. seen at a distance and from the 
back, while to the right can be seen the roofs of 
the main part of Chaumont. 



AN AVIATION FIELD 

THE airman of the future, who after a flight of ten hours or so loses 
himself in fog, or through the failure of his instruments has drifted 
wide of his course, will experience some uncertainty of the country or 
state in which he has landed if he depends entirely upon the appearance of 
aerodromes. At present they seem to have an international pattern consisting 
of a row of hangars of canvas, wood, or metal and with a prairie as a front 
yard. For this reason the drawing shown here will make no particular appeal 
as a spot on this earth with a definite geographical location. As a matter of 
fact, it is the parking space in front of the long line of hangars on Field No. i 
at Issoudun, the largest of our aviation 
schools in France. 

[7] 



A ROAD AT THE FRONT 

IT would be hard to explain the feeling of safety that a thin veil of leaves 
and branches gives to one, whether it be the overhead screening of a gun 
pit or the long curtain of camouflage along a roadside. You need but to 
cross an open field in possible view of a far-seeing enemy and duck behind a 
net of burlap and raffia to appreciate fully this sense of snugness and protec- 
tion. But it is chiefly a mental comfort, and the real purpose of these 
sheltered ways was to deprive the enemy, as far as possible, of the joy of 
sniping at you with his artillery. The road shown here is near Baccarat, 
and leads from Merviller to Pexonne. The Germans occupied the distant 
hills and had an observation post on the sharper rise of the hill 
which shows in the center of this drawing. 



AN ARTILLERY POSITION AT PEXONNE 

THIS drawing was made on one of those early April days that are bathed 
in the first real warmth of spring sunshine. Hardly ten feet from where 
I stood was a group of apple trees in full splendor of pink blossoms, 
and except for a gash of raw dirt and mud that marked the subterranean 
passage to a cave through whose narrow, horizontal window a gun pointed 
to the enemy, the grass about me was a mat of soft lusciousness. In a nearby 
field a man could be seen plowing. Against this setting of pastoral beauty it 
was difficult to account for the line of shattered trees and fallen branches that 
marked the position of our batteries and the enemy's efforts to silence them. 
It was harder still to explain the peculiar whirring sound of an on-coming 
shell and its sudden burst in the tranquil blue dome above your head. Here 
was a picture of war that was not for a warrior but for a poet . . . 
a poet in a "tin hat." 

[9] 



A CHOW LINE 

WAITING around occupies about ninety per cent of a soldier's time; 
and it would seem that most of this time was spent in a line or cue. 
From the day on which you first take your place in line for physical 
examination until that day when you stand waiting in line for your discharge 
papers your entire soldierhood is a succession of hours of waiting in long, 
slow-moving files. It would be hard to say which of these is the most unpleas- 
ant and which the least. It depends, of course, on what is waiting for you at 
the end of it . . . a "shot in the arm" or your pay. But experience indicates 
that it is more apt to be a swelling in your arm than in your purse. The most 
habitual line of all is the mess line, and in the degree of hope and promise that 
it holds forth it is the most popular of them all. This drawing shows a frag- 
ment of such a "chow line." Along the route of our camps and rest billets it 
seemed as if these hunger lines were a perpetual institution, and it was a rare 
occasion indeed when you did not see at least three or four of these files of 
unfillable doughboys holding their mess kits while their puttees 
bristled with knives, forks and spoons. 

[10] 



A BILLET IN PEXONNE 

ALTHOUGH rest billets were generally conceded to be unrest billets, 
still the impression one got in passing through a string of these vil- 
^ lages in back of the front was that by far the greatest majority of its 
khaki-clad inhabitants were devoting themselves to doing nothing in par- 
ticular; and whether they were enjoying a rest or merely enduring one, the 
outstanding fact remains that they were not suffering from work, whatever 
else their grievances might have been (and no doubt there were many). The 
one undeniable privilege of a soldier is his kicking-right and to rob him of the 
causes that provoke the exercise of this privilege would render many a man 
speechless, which, of course, would never do. And so, a wanderer in the areas 
of rest, if he should weigh the snatches of a doughboy's conversation that he 
had overheard, would probably find ninety-nine per cent of it grumble talk, 
varying from the characteristic condemnation of the army life to some insig- 
nificant grievance between himself and his bunkie. All this the doughboy 
fully enjoys. It is the vent of emotions conceived in the pain of physical 
discomfort and born during moments of temporary leisure. This drawing is 
characteristic of a setting of billets and doughboys in a rest area. It is in 
the village of Pexonne, northeast of Baccarat. 

[II] 



A VIEW OF LANGRES 

IANGRES was the A. E. F. capital of military learning. Situated on a 
high plateau, its appearance is suggestive of the hill towns of Italy. 
■^ From the ancient walls that surround the town one can look down upon 
great stretches of rolling country, ribboned with silver-white roads and pat- 
terned with patches of fields and woodland. Against this tranquillity of spa- 
ciousness, a casual visitor might be startled by the sudden sound of artillery, 
the violence of exploding hand-grenades and trench mortars. If he happened 
to be a visitor from St. Nazaire, or some other lower reach of the S. O. S. with 
a rather vague knowledge (as is apt to be the case) of the exact location of 
the front, he might have enjoyed the thrill that accompanies one's first sound 
of guns. And if that happened to be the case, it was a pity to have to tell 
him that the real front was many kilometers beyond his hearing and that he 
had merely been listening to what one might call the school-room 
exercises of some of our various colleges of destruction. 

[12] 



A VIEW OF NEUFCHATEAU 

THE drawing was made from a hill at the west of the town, and although 
the town spreads to the right in an area about as much again as is seen 
here, it gives one an idea of the rather compact clustering of houses in 
these smaller French towns. It shows also, and the knowledge was not ahvays 
a comforting one, how easy it would be and, for that matter, how easy it was 
for an enemy airman to find it a target for his night bombs. Located about 
half way between General Headquarters and the front, Neufchateau was 
always a center of American activity. It served as headquarters for all sorts 
of organizations or it would be the temporary organizing point for the various 
sections of our fast growing armies. Officers would suddenly crowd into town, 
get billeted with considerable trouble (since the town was not very large) and 
then vanish again, only to be succeeded by a new group. Here too was located 
a base hospital and also the "Guest House" which was the army's official 
bureau for distinguished visitors. And so, taking it all in all, the sleepy town 
of Neufchateau prospered and with true French thrift kept its 
earnings against the coming of the dull days of peace. 

[13I 




M«W»» 7»,*)»» 



AT MENIL-LA^TOUR 

THE villages in Lorraine were, as a rule, rather void of any architectural 
charm. Their houses, hardly ever more than two stories high, were 
usually strung along both sides of the main highway, not free-standing, 
but wall to wall, and alternating between stables and dwelhngs, and occa- 
sionally, it would seem, a combination of both. These houses, as a rule, were 
set back from the highway to allow room for a wagon stand and the inevi- 
table treasure-pile of manure. Occasionally a village would boast a by-street 
or two, and chance, or its original founders would bless it with a site on the 
junction of two roads. It would then look almost like a real town. Menil-la- 
Tour was one of these cross-road villages; it was ugly and dusty or ugly and 
muddy, according to the season of the year; but always ugly. Neither was it 
in any way beautified by the addition of long lines of barracks and storage 
houses and the various mountainous unloadings of quartermaster supplies 
that our occupation of the village made necessary. The place served originally 
as our first divisional headquarters, but later with the growth of our forces 
and the spread of our fighting activities, it became a rail-head and a sort of 
half-way station to the Toul sector front. This drawing was made on the 
by-road that leads to Sanzy and although it gives one an idea of the character 
of these villages it does but poor justice 
to their stark ugliness. 

[14] 










*'*^***«..- 



A VIEW FROM THE TERRACE AT BOUCQ. 

AS a grandstand seat of the panorama of war, the terrace of the chateau 
at Boucq (a divisional headquarters) would havebeen unique if the war 
^ in this quarter had been more war-like and less a matter of business. 
Even during the St. Mihiel drive, aside from the thunder of several thousand 
guns and their flashes that lighted the night hke the fires of hell, the view, by 
day, remained one of expansive tranquillity. This sweep of country, of which 
this drawing shows but one segment, gave one an excellent comprehension of 
the "lay of the land" north of Toul. And although it was never bristling with 
the evidence of war, the occasions were rare when one could not see the smoke 
of distant shell-fire, or far above the distant hills observe the puffs of bursting 
shrapnel where some "archie" was bent on stopping the 
progress of a scouting airman. 

[15] 



^^'^^'M'&d 








WAGONS AND TENTS 

THIS drawing shows a field encampment near Menil-Ia-Tour which in its 
confusion of wagons and tents is suggestive of the old-time pictures of 
bivouacs in our Civil War. Except at the front, where concealment was 
imperative, the pictorial aspect of troops and convoys and encampments was 
probably not so different from what it was in the earher wars, before long- 
range guns and aeroplanes widened the zone of danger and made us hide our- 
selves under chicken wire and burlap and paint ourselves protectively. For 
all that, the old-fashioned hand-to-hand fighting has 
not yet gone out of style. 

[.6] 



A VIEW OF BEAUMONT 

BEFORE our troops were rushed to Cantigny and the Marne to help stop 
the German drive toward Paris, Beaumont was the storm center of 
what was at that time considered an active sector. Northwest of 
Toul, it was approached by way of the Menil-la-Tour road, through Ausau- 
ville and Mandres. Beyond Mandres the road grew "hot" and reached the 
high point of adventure at about half way between Mandres and Beaumont, 
at a curve in the road which, because of its "unhealthy" atmosphere and the 
resulting casualties, became known as "Dead Man's Corner." As an approach 
to Beaumont it offered a sort of sporting element to the occasional visitor in 
search of thrills, but for the business of bringing up supplies it was a serious 
matter. And especially, too, as the shelling of this particular spot on the road 
occurred regularly with the approach of a convoy or any tempting target. The 
story goes that "Dead Man's Corner" continued to be deadly until a certain 
"priest" was caught signalling the German lines from a church tower by 
means of the hands of a clock. After that the road was usually safe. The view 
of Beaumont shown here is from the west of this once perilous corner and 
,, shows the back of the village and looking m the 

direction of the German lines. 

[17] 



RUINS IN RAMBUCOURT 

THE effect of shell-fire on architecture is based on a combination of 
violence plus the distance from the front. Some day an idle scientist 
will plot a curve which will start with the dust of a village in No-man's 
Land and end, let us say, in type XL-io, or the single penetration in the only 
house struck in a town x-kilometers from the firing hne. Between these two 
extremes there are ruins covering every shade and degree of destruction and 
as clearly significant of their distance from the enemy as milestones. In the 
Toul sector, this theory of miles and demolition was open to proof to even the 
most casual observer. Starting with the occasional markings of the night- 
flying Hun, and advancing through Menil-Ia-Tour, Ausauville, Mandres and 
into Beaumont, the houses became more and more shattered, more and more 
roofless, and proportionately unsafe. Beyond Beaumont, in Seicheprey, the 
houses were without roofs, just so many jagged waUs, while in the distance 
out in No-man's Land, there were neither roofs nor walls, but piles of masonry 
that looked like tombstones, and indeed were the tombstones 
of dead and vanished villages. 

[i8] 



A COMPANY BILLET 

THE doughboy's private opinion of billets would probably look crude in 
print. Describing the average one would impoverish his vast fund of 
profanity. And you can hardly blame him. There were, no doubt, billets 
and billets, but it is safe to assume that all of them were open to comparison 
only in terms of varying degrees of discomfort. A truly comfortable billet was 
probably unknown; and although the word comfort is a relative one, the word 
discomfort (in the advance zone of the army) was, at any rate, open to but 
one interpretation. It meant the state of being uncomfortable, and this, for 
more than one reason, since there are sure to be at least two, and 
usually several more. Ask any cootied soldier. 

[19] 



AN ARMY KITCHEN 

THE army cook seemed to have had a knack of making his immediate 
surroundings home-like. It may have been because of the comforting 
smell of food, or the sight of pots and pans and the huge corrugated ash 
barrels steaming with chow and coffee. And although he may not have always 
held an enviable position and had to suffer the ungracious labors of dis- 
gruntled "K. Ps.," there must have been occasions, perhaps three times a 
day, when he was looked upon with great favor, assuming, of course, that he 
was indeed a cook. And most of them were, in a whole-hearted sort of way. 
At any rate, they served their long files of hungry "boarders" with speed, and 
they served them hot, which is the secret of serving army food, 
and also the secret of eating it. 

[20] 



THE BILLET BEAUTIFUL 

IT is an open question whether or not the average doughboy was insensible 
to the beauties of France. Certainly the sum total of his impressions 
must have stood on the plus side of beauty rather than on the minus, 
provided, of course, he had the leisure to weigh his thoughts on the matter 
and a vision that could see beyond the mud, dust, manure, cooties and other 
distractions of the ideal military life. Far enough behind the lines and beyond 
the mental disturbance of air-raids and artillery fire, he no doubt enjoyed 
moments of aesthetic exhilaration, and it is safe to venture that even then 
these higher impulses were prompted by the reaction of a full stomach, sun- 
shine, and the enjoyment of an occasional hour of play. But rest billets, as 
a rule, belied their name and resulted (no doubt through the far-sighted 
machination of the officers of the Staff) in giving rise to a restlessness that 
made a return to the front something to be earnestly desired. Here, though, 
is pictured a place which must have made at least a slight impression of 
loveliness on even the most hardened and indifferent young warrior. It has 
a stage-like setting of prettiness. But more appealing to the practical Yank 
was the soft sun-baked meadow grass which formed the mattress of his pup- 
tent, the meadow itself with its opportunity for baseball, and best of all a 
(so-called) river for bathing, while within easy walking distance was a small 
town with paved streets, sidewalks, shops, and things to buy and 
eat. What more could a doughboy want? 

[21] 



A SADDLER'S ROOM 

THE same fortunes of war and billeting that gave to a division com- 
mander for his headquarters the luxury of a chateau and furnished him 
with a night's rest among soft linens and feathers, and placed above his 
troubled head a canopy of gorgeous brocade, would occasionally hft the 
doughboy out of the mud into drier and more spacious quarters. The mon- 
astery at Rangeval was just such a place where from out of a wallow of 
wetness one could step on to firm pavements, along echoing corridors and 
into spacious apartments. This drawing shows one room in this huge sanctu- 
ary, a massive vaulted chamber, solemn and impressive, and before the 
American occupation was used, no doubt, for some somber purpose. Under 
the reign of Doughboy the First, it became a saddler's room, and although 
in this drawing the saddler himself is shown in an attitude suggestive of 
prayer, it is more hlcely that his pose has nothing to do with his thoughts. 
As a matter of fact, the general trend of his discourse, as I recall it, was a 
protest, uttered without reservations, on the wide-world carelessness of 
leather-using men and beasts, with a special reference to army men and 
army beasts, together with a mild inquiry regarding 
the duration of wars. 



A MONASTERY BILLET 

IT would be curious to know, if walls could speak, just what impression the 
profane bantering of healthy doughboys made upon the sacred cells in the 
old monastery at RangevaL Probably none at all, since, previous to the 
American occupation, these buildings were, from time to time, used by 
French troops, and so these hallowed walls had their opportunity to grow 
accustomed to the harmless violence of soldier talk long before American 
words took the place of French. The setting, though, of callous military 
youths, crowded eight to a room where once but one saintly mortal existed 
in silent prayer and meditation, was a curious one to contemplate. A little 
later these buildings were put to a more fitting use; the place became a field 
hospital, and with the red cross flying from it, it must have felt 
itself restored to its former dignity. 

[24] 



"LAME DUCKS" 

NOT the least part of an aerodrome is the junk heap, and for that matter, 
the graveyard, too, although the jest seems a cruel one. The aviators, 
who know the frailty of machines and men, were inclined to lump 
these two burial grounds together; and so little did they allow the solemnity 
of death to afFect them that on an inspection of the aviation fields at Issou- 
dun they would point out to you the nine fields that marked the progressive 
flights of flying, from ground flutterings to stunting, and then with grim 
humor, point to the cemetery as "Field No. lo." This caflous disregard for 
the finer sensibihties of feeling was a protection necessary to safeguard the 
saneness of an aviator's mind, where, in the process of making men into birds, 
machines crashed daily and the toll of casualties was often appalling. This 
drawing shows a few remnants of machines that wifl never again lift their 
wheels into the blue. Shorn of their wings, crumpled and dented, they 
lay outside a repair shop and underwent a slow process of demolition by 
mechanics who took from them, bit by bit, some fragment that might 
be used again to rebuild some less shattered plane. 

[25] 



A REPAIR SHOP AT ISSOUDUN 

THE confidence that one may have in the strength of an aeroplane is apt 
to undergo a shock when one sees these frail creatures, in a repair shop, 
stripped of the covering of cloth and paint that gives to their graceful 
bodies such an appearance of solidity. This feehng of mistrust is increased 
when, instead of a single machine, one looks through a whole row of these 
skeletons; you feel your vision swimming through a maze of tiny struts and 
wires and braces, until you lose all sense of their sohdity and believe your- 
self to be contemplating the ghosts of shattered planes. This 
drawing is of a repair shop at Issoudun. 

[26] 



V. 



A GATEWAY TO THE FRONT 

*0 have told the Yank who spent his days in mud wallows and slept in 
some reinforced corner of a shattered dwelling which threatened with 
every shell-burst to tumble its walls about his ears, that his surroundings 
were picturesque would have probably evoked from him a comment that 
would have been one-tenth increduhty and nine-tenths profanity. The fight- 
ing Yank was not at the front to admire his surroundings, and if the casual 
visitor, in a neat uniform and poHshed leather, should see him in a setting 
capable of provoking a pleasant reaction in the mind of a detached observer, 
well, that was none of his business. This drawing, though, is offered as 
evidence of the fact that "above the mud and scum of things" there was 
occasional beauty in the ugliness of the doughboy's customary abode. It was 
made among the ruins of the village of Rambucourt, and shows a communi- 
cation trench leading to the front hnes. Between the timbers that support a 
now tileless roof is a netting of camouflage intended to veil the 
movement of traffic along the road upon which the house faces. 

[27] 



AN AMERICAN GRAVEYARD 

IT was characteristic of the Yank, and proof of his healthy courage, to 
think lightly of death. And this, too, in spite of the fact that it stalked him 
twenty-four hours a day, and appeared to him in as many forms as disease 
and modern warfare could invent. But beneath the pretense of indifference, 
the expression of the loss of a "buddie" was, perhaps, more commonly uttered 
in a vow for vengeance. And to those to whom, in the heat of battle, the 
opportunity came it is safe to assume that many an account was settled. 
This drawing shows what was probably the first American graveyard in 
France; it is on the edge of Menil-Ia-Tour, the small village north of Toul 
which served as our first divisional headquarters. The sketch was made at a 
time when American cemeteries were rare in France. Our forces at that time 
were comparatively small, and we had not yet tasted the fuller fury of war 
and the toll that it exacts. This was to come later; and one needs but to 
travel behind the sweep of our battle hnes, or to the many more peaceful 
enclosures near our base hospitals, to know what our 
assurance of hberty has cost us. 

[28] 



AN UNSAFE BILLET IN RAMBUCOURT 

HOUSES whose windows opened on to a view of No-man's Land had a 
way, sooner or later, of losing their windows and roofs, and for that 
matter, everything but their cellars. Even these were open to a 
general shake-up by means of a direct hit. And yet in spite of all that they 
must have faced, some houses were lucky enough to preserve the semblance 
of their former selves. Here is one that looked at the enemy for four years, 
and although battle-scarred it still possesses the essential elements of a 
domestic residence, which is more than one can say of ninety 
per cent of the houses on the firing line. 

[29] 



THE SHELTER OF A CHURCH 

HERE is a church which, robbed of its spiritual usefulness, continued, 
nevertheless, to render bodily shelter. To the distinct elements of 
church architecture, war and its proximity to the firing Hne gave to 
this church an architectural appendage in the form of a massive skirting of 
masonry that encircled the apse and with a roof of heavy timbers and galvan- 
ized iron, earth and stone, formed a snug shelter against bursting shells. 
Connected with it was a communication trench which, before a war that did 
not discriminate between ecclesiastical and domestic architecture, would 
strike one as a strange way indeed to go to church. 

[30] 



A RAILHEAD DUMP 

THE word "dump," like so many other war-requisitioned words, was par- 
ticularly fitting for the designation of a storage depot at the front. It 
suggests the hurried and disorderly dehvery of suppHes brought up by 
trains that dared go no farther, the hasty unloading of them, and the stacking 
of the various boxes and bales in scattered heaps which, to the casual 
observer, seemed more the result of the enemy's airbombs than the (more or 
less) organized plan of the Depot Quartermaster. Prominent in this picture 
is a mountain of baled straw in the process of being covered with canvas 
against the inevitable rains; other heaps of supphes are being similarly pro- 
tected, while on the left, along the siding, is a wood pile; and although the 
drawing does not show it, it is safe to assume that this pile, like other precious 
wood piles up and down the line, is being guarded against 
petty larceny by a specially appointed sentry. 

[31] 



A REGIMENT AT MESS 

A REGIMENT on the way to the front is seen halted for mess, the most 
welcome of all interruptions to the day's march that a hot, weary and 
dust-covered soldier can look forward to. This setting of barns and 
sheds is an unattractive one, but the shade of the buildings offered some 
protection from the sun's heat, and besides, the ofTicial regimental records, 
as far as I know, have never yet listed a protest regarding the time, place and 
general surroundings in which a mess was served; it is the unofficial and 
unrecorded protests that dealt, primarily, with the time, place and 
generai surroundings where a mess was not served. 

[32] 



AT NEVERS 

AS a spectacle of our fighting efforts, taken as a whole, it would be hard 
to say which was the more impressive — the dramatic deeds of our com- 
^ bat troops or the vast and varied accomphshments of labor and produc- 
tion by the men who stood in back of them. The curse and virtue of war is 
the glamour that it attaches to the doing of heroic deeds, and for that reason 
the unheroic acts of drudgery are passed by unsung and leave unglorified 
some equally gallant youth whom circumstance denied the opportunity for 
the proof of his courage. And so, far back from the harvest Hne of our war 
crosses and citations for bravery, there were many stout hearts wearing over- 
alls. The railroad that led to the front covered miles of unheroic drudgery, 
days and nights of persistent labor by men whose union hours was the union 
of service between themselves and their brothers at the front. And together 
they did the trick. The drawing shows one of these obscure corners of labor; 
it is the yard of a huge locomotive repair shop at Nevers. The building in the 
foreground had first to be completed by us before we could equip it for work. 
It is one example of the tremendous tasks that were 
accomplished behind the lines. 

[33] 



ASSEMBLING LIBERTY PLANES 

ANYONE who was forced to taste the anguish of scrambling for shelter, 
or had to "play possum," or in any way suffered the uneasiness pro- 
^ voked by the hovering presence of a Boche plane that enjoyed unre- 
stricted air privileges, had every reason to smile with bitterness at that wild 
boast we made of filling the skies of France with Liberty planes. In time, of 
course, the sight of our cockade of red, blue and white on the under planes 
of machines did become more frequent; but there was still lots of room in the 
air for more. Ask any front-line man. At Romorantin a vast camp with rows 
of barracks and longer rows of shops was built for the job of assembhng the 
Liberty planes as fast as they arrived. Once assembled, they were 
tested in flight and then "ferried" to the front. 

[34l 



WfTTTp^ l i ^ '" i f;f..;!,j^ 



t » . . 




44-4 



AT THE CAMOUFLAGE FACTORY 

THE art of camouflage made such an appeal to the imagination of the 
American pubhc that it not only adopted this fuII-sounding word as a 
slang expression, but countless people with no more knowledge of the 
art than one can get second-handed and three thousand miles from the 
Western Front filled cokimns of print and the hollow spaces of lecture halls 
with marvelous accounts of this new factor in modern warfare. Ninety per 
cent of it was rot. At the front, although many ingenious devices and tricks 
had, from time to time, been employed, camouflage consisted chiefly of the 
screening of gun emplacements and roads by the use of wire netting covered 
with burlap and raflia, or by the direct employment of tree branches. Guns, 
motor trucks and other conspicuous pieces of war furniture were painted in 
three or four colors in a sort of gigantic pattern of shapes resembling the 
fragments of a jig-saw puzzle. In our camouflage factory at Dijon, where 
this sketch was made, the greater part of the manufacture of camouflage 
materials was done by women refugees under the 
supervision of our soldiers and officers. 

[35] 



SAUMUR 

THIS is a drawing of one of the main buildings of the famous French 
cavalry school at Saumur which was given over to our use as an artillery 
school. Here the candidates for commissions received the laborious 
instructions that would eventually quahfy them as masters of guns, and send 
them forth to form one more source of trouble and unrest 
for the Knights of Kultur. 

[36] 



IN THE SALVAGE DEPOT AT ST. PIERRE-DES-CORPS 

ANY man who has had the sorry job of being a supply officer knows the 
anguish and the exceedingly rare moments of triumphant satisfaction 
^ that attended his efforts to keep his men in clothing and equipment. 
The uniform neatness that is expected of soldiers is accepted as part and 
parcel of mihtary disciphne; but it does not in the least make it easier for 
the supply officer. He is everlastingly being pestered with demands for new 
boots, new breeches, and new this and that, and a wire-torn and tattered 
company of men were continually expecting him to produce for them rai- 
ments regardless of time or place. Many of our men at the front resembled 
the proverbial hobo with the shght difference of being in khaki instead of the 
usual assorted tatters. And many a stalwart soldier returning from an excur- 
sion into a wire-tangled No-man's Land has put his whole faith in the 
holding-power of one pin. Although the supply officer's troubles did not end 
(they never do), they were, at least, made lighter by the increased efficiency 
of the organization devoted to the distribution of clothing and equipment and 
its repair. This, in an army of two million men, was a tremendous under- 
taking. This drawing shows one corner of a huge building in the salvage 
depot at St. Pierre-des-Corps where everything but the doughboy 
himself could be mended and again put into service. 

[37] 



A FARM AT SAVENAY 

WHEN the doughboy was not fighting or doing kitchen police or some 
other task that made him wonder why he had been given a gun and 
taught to shoot it, he was a farmer. The occasion, though, was not so 
frequent as to weaken our lines. And yet there were enough vegetable patches 
to be seen in our camp areas to justify the General Order from G. H. Q. which 
brought these "Liberty Gardens" into existence. The drawing shows some- 
thing much more pretentious than the scattered patches of weeds and vege- 
tables that one associates with the agricultural efforts of the A. E. F. This 
is almost a real farm. It was used in connection with the large base hospital 
at Savenay, and served not only to furnish the hospital mess with fresh 
vegetables but it offered employment to convalescent soldiers who were not 
yet well enough to go back again to war. The center house, in the back- 
ground, served as the farm superintendent's headquarters and contained a 
"ward" of about eight beds for a squad of temporary farm hands. Against 
the horizon can be seen the long roof line of the hospital itself, a group of 
attractive-looking buildings which, before the war and our 
arrival in France, was a schoolhouse. 

[38] 



A REFRIGERATING PLANT 

FRANCE, of the A. E. F., like Gaul, was divided into three parts: The 
Base Section, the Intermediate Section, and the Advance Section. Later, 
and sooner than most of us dreamed possible, a fourth was added . . . 
but that was in Germany. Generally speaking, these three zones might be 
designated as the areas of arrival, storage, and consumption. Sooner or later 
the river of all our efforts emptied into the front lines, where it could best be 
seen and felt by our incredulous enemy. This drawing was made in the Inter- 
mediate Section at Gievres, where on a prairie of sand, sprinkled with spindly 
oaks, we created a huge storage depot, one of those unsightly settlements of 
rapid growth composed of avenues of raw wooden barracks, and warehouses 
as long as a city block. This particular view shows the refrigerating plant, a 
colossal establishment that was either a world's record among ice plants or 
came very near being one. Anyway, it was large enough to make you marvel, 
especially when you looked at its ponderous equipment of compressors and 
other machinery and realized that, like the doughboy, it had all 
successfully run the gantlet of the ruthless subs. 

[39] 



AN OBSERVATION BALLOON 

THE observation balloon, called by the French a "sausage," deserves a 
better name. It is far too animate in appearance to be named after a 
more or less inanimate thing. With its great gray body silently swaying 
between heaven and earth, its nose in the wind, and with its red, white and 
bkie cockade looking for all the world Hke a watchful eye, it impressed you 
as being, perhaps, some Martian monster, a cross between a gigantic elephant 
and a whale. It is a chimsy, helpless creature with the hopeless ambition to 
be invisible. While in the air its huge body looms up as the biggest spot on 
the horizon, and it was the constant prey of the balloon-hunting aeroplane, 
and the target of every ambitious artillery man. And in its desire to appear 
inconspicuous, it was even more pathetic when you came upon it in the clear- 
ing of a wood, or in a field among a scattering of trees ; here, partially deflated, 
you found it with its belly squashed to the earth, the most humble of God's 
creatures. The drawing shows one of these timid monsters on its 
way to the front, and hesitating at a crossroad. 

[40] 



IN REHERRY 

IF it were not for mud, rain, and more rain, dirt, manure, cooties, air-raids, 
shell-fire, gas, and this whole pack of miseries encumbered with military 
duties, and enveloped by the depressing presence of a seemingly endless 
war, it is quite possible that many of the French villages in which the dough- 
boy found himself invited to rest would prove, under more joyous circum- 
stances, to be (as the guide books put it) "quaint and picturesque." But the 
doughboy's day was without time for aesthetic contemplation; and yet, if he 
had but lifted his eyes halfway between the mud and a visiting enemy plane, 
it is quite probable that he would have found himself confronted with some- 
thing that might have stirred in him a momentary appreciation of old-time 
loveliness. The village of Reherry, near Baccarat, 
offered him this chance. 

[41] 



AT MONTDIDIER 

THE first phase of the German "Peace Offensive" which was launched in 
March, 191 8, and had for its object a sphtting apart of the French and 
British armies and a general victorious clean-up, was halted within a 
few miles of Amiens. Although a terrific blow to the confidence we had felt 
in the strength of our Alhed forces, it served to estabhsh a unity of command 
with General Foch in supreme authority. Following his appointment at this 
most critical time, came General Pershing's offer of all that we had in men 
and materials. It was a thrilHng event and marked a turning point in our 
activities. It heralded our entrance into the "Big Fight," and hfted our First 
Division out of the Toul trenches and placed them, for the first time, in a 
position for open warfare and in front of Montdidier at the very point of the 
German salient. The drawing shows a street in Montdidier with the Hotel 
de Ville on the right, badly battered, but still standing. Architecturally, the 
building is ornate and heavy . . . and Teutonic, 
which may account for its preservation. 

[43] 



A BASE HOSPITAL 

BASE hospitals varied architecturally from extensive three and four 
storied school houses and public buildings to a string of white tents. 
Between these two extremes it is safe to say that every kind of house, 
provided it was spacious and airy, was employed for the care of our sick and 
wounded. The drawing shows one located on the boundary between base 
hospitals and evacuation hospitals. It was located at Bazoille; and although 
it started with the occupation of a rather modern-looking chateau, attended 
by a medical unit from Johns Hopkins, it soon grew, with the addition of new 
units, in an amazing manner, extending itself into long train-like rows of 
wooden ward buildings which ended in lines of canvas tents, crossed the 
Meuse and the highway and sprouted again in more rows of tents and wooden 
buildings. From the road that rises in the direction of Neufchateau, one 
could look down on to the pleasant sight of these neat lines of houses set in 
green pastures; and at night the whole valley was a basin of twinkling lights, 
the gayest sight in all that country of ordered darkness. But if you happened 
to be there at the moment when the siren screamed a warning of an approach- 
ing air-raider, you would have seen a thousand lights go out at once, 
and felt your eyes swim with the shock of sudden darkness. 

[44] 



CANTIGNY 

THE taking of Cantigny on May 28th, 191 8, was our opening bow in 
the "Big Show." Up to that time we had been doing an extensive 
guard duty along so-called quiet sectors beyond Toul, and in trenches. 
But in the Montdidier sector we came out of ground and had our first taste 
of open warfare and real fighting. Our First Division, which was given this 
position of honor, celebrated the occasion by launching the first American 
offensive, with Cantigny as the target. The affair was a huge success. But 
the Germans did not hke it; they protested with a perfect hell of shell-fire and 
gas. But it did no good . . . we had come to stay. At the end of this dispute 
over which of us should have Cantigny, there was very little of Cantigny to 
have. The drawing will verify this statement. The sketch was made in the 
direction in which our troops made their attack, and it shows to some extent 
the advantage that the possession of this town had, situated, as it was, on a 
hill, over troops that were dug-in below it. And that 
IS exactly why we took it. 

[45] 



CRASHED 

REGARDING the virtues or weaknesses of our Liberty planes, it was 
difficult to get any definite opinion. Although every aviator had some- 
thing to say on the subject, it seemed as if no two could agree. There 
were those extremists who persistently denied their existence, those who 
conceded their existence but only on the evidence of a rumor, and those who 
had met some one who claimed to have actually seen one in flight, and so, by 
varying degrees of decreasing pessimism upward to the most optimistic dec- 
laration of their great numbers in France and their remarkable capabilities. 
This drawing is, perhaps, an argument on the negative side; although the 
pilot of this machine claimed that the motor failed to support him, and 
forced him to land among furrows that tripped him on to his nose, I, having 
witnessed the caprices of these frail birds of wood and linen, decided on this 
occasion to keep aloof from argument, and contented myself merely in 
recording the rather unusual pose of this plane, leaving the reason for its 
attitude to those who know much more about flying 
and landing than I do. 

[46] 



A MOTOR TRAIN CONCEALED 

THE rather habitual supremacy of the air which the Germans enjoyed 
during the long interval of waiting which our men at the front suffered 
while that boast of "ten thousand planes in France" failed to material- 
ize made day-travel a rather precarious undertaking in back of the hnes, 
while at the immediate front it was out of the question. The spying enemy 
planes would signal the artillery and the immediate dehvery of shells put an 
end to a convoy's progress. Accordingly, our forces, preceding an attack, 
kept themselves under cover in the daylight and did their digging and truck- 
ing under the protection of darkness. This sketch shows a supply train that 
has parked along a roadside under the shelter of trees, and ihas in addition 
been screened by a veritable hedge of tree branches and saplings. In the 
woods, against which these trucks were lined, was the encampment of the 
train's personnel. These wooded bivouacs offered our men the opportunity of 
a wide scope of ingenuity in the building of their shelters, and by stretching 
their shelter-halves between trees, and with a thatching of leaves, and with 
bunks made of springy saplings, the more energetic men contrived for them- 
selves huts that had, or seemed to have, all 
the appearance of comfort. 

[47] 



A REGIMENTAL HEADQUARTERS 

ARMY headquarters afforded an interesting study ; they were as different 
as their distance from the firing line. The pomp and poHsh of General 
^ Headquarters faded into the less garnished mihtary procedure and 
neatness as you went from Divisional headquarters to Brigade headquarters 
and so on down the Hnes, always nearer the bursting shells, into Regimental 
headquarters, and from there to Battahon headquarters and the zone of 
machine-gun fire and other forms of sudden death. Architecturally, the same 
progression was evident; you passed from a ckister of four-storied barrack 
buildings through rich men's chateaux, farm buildings, peasants' huts, to a 
hole in the mud twenty feet below air level. The drawing shows one of these 
just one step removed from the subway type. It was Colonel Neville's 
"home," on the edge of Belleau Wood, in "la Maison Blanche" during those 
days of hot fighting in June, 1918. And the fact that the Germans knew its 
exact location, and were in the habit of showing that 
they did, made it a rather exciting abode. 

[48] 



A WOOD ENCAMPMENT 

PRECEDING the days of an offensive, the roads along the front, in the 
daytime, were so empty and so quiet (if you discounted the sounds of 
guns) that travel along them gave you, at times, a positive pang of 
lonehness. Except for an occasional M. P. at a crossroad, who stopped you 
in order to examine your papers (from what I thought was often a desire on 
his part for human intercourse and companionship rather than from a sense 
of duty) you seemed to be traveling in a deserted land, the undisturbed 
emptiness of which made you sometimes wonder if the speed of your motor 
had not carried you to a point where the next M. P. would be a German. The 
fields on either side of the road were bare of life, but if you stopped at a place 
where the road cut through a patch of woods, and parted the screen of 
branches that faced the highway, you would find, much to your surprise, that 
the whole place was swarming with troops, the encampment of a whole 
regiment, hidden under a canopy of leaves against the all-seeing 
eye of enemy aeroplanes. 

[49] 



IN BELLEAU WOOD 

OUR fight in Belleau Wood opened the eyes of our Allies as well as our 
enemy to a reahzation of the full significance of our entrance into the 
war. To our aid in money and materials it added the first proof of the 
threat of our arms. To the Germans who came in actual conflict with our 
men, the ferocity of our fighting was an astounding revelation of the trans- 
formation of a people whom they had been taught to sneer at as money- 
hoarding pacifists. Sheltered behind moss-covered bowlders, and screened by 
a veritable jungle of trees and saplings, the Germans poured the deadly 
stream of their machine-gun fire into the advancing waves of slender youths in 
khaki who were stopped only by death or mortal wounds, or who came on 
unafraid, and with bayonet and rifle butt silenced forever the astounded 
veterans of the "Lord of War." This drawing gives one an idea of the thick- 
ness of growth through which our men had to fight. In the foreground is 
"battaUon headquarters," a dug-out which was a httle more spacious and 
architecturafly pretentious than the grave-like holes which formed the duck- 
ing shelters of the men when shells began to falL On a tree in easy reach of 
the "front door" of battalion headquarters is the horn which 
sounded the warning of a gas attack. 

[50] 



AN ADVANCE DRESSING STATION 

WAR hospitals were seldom the white-enameled, glistening havens of 
sanitation and blessedness that we were inclined to imagine them — 
that is, if we formed our idea of them from salon paintings of dainty, 
white-shrouded, red-crossed angels of mercy, bending over mummy-wrapped 
heroes three-quarters submerged in snow-white bedding and glorified by 
shafts of golden sunhght. Nothing like that. To the average wounded 
soldier, a bed with a mattress, pillow, and sheets (white or near-white) was 
all of heaven that he needed. He could dispense (for a while at least) with 
the enamel fmish and the sanitary angels. It was just as well, too, since the 
chances were that he would not get them; not, at least, until he had been 
"evacuated" two or three times and landed in a base hospital with white 
walls, cute nurses, and cut flowers. Field hospitals are too mobile to go in for 
interior decorations, and usually too busy to keep out flies and disorder. 
They are clearing houses for the newly wounded . . . somber places with a 
somber business. But along the route that leads from the battlefield to the 
distant base hospitals there is no more impressive spot than the first halting 
place of the wounded, the advance dressing station. This drawing shows one 
of these near Belleau Wood. It was along the day-path that led to the wood, 
a sort of gufly that divided the fields at this point, and the dressing station 
was established under a culvert where the road crossed the gufly. Its 
approach along the narrow trail that led to it was marked by a sad litter of 
discarded equipment, torn clothing, broken blood-stained stretchers, rifles, 
pierced and dented helmets, while over the ground were strewn letters . . . 
home letters, most of them which, in this dismal place of suff^ering and 
desperate need, spun their thread of contact three thousand miles away to 
where anxious people read bulletins and waited in dull suspense 
to have their fears abated. 

[51] 



A BELLEAU FARM 

THIS cluster of buildings is on the outskirts of the village of Belleau and 
was in the path of our advance after we had cleared Belleau Wood and 
started forward with the general movement on July i8th, 191 8, which 
marked the turning point of the war. In the foreground are seen German 
outpost positions facing Belleau Wood, while in back are a shattered dovecot 
and a few fluttering doves which had, no doubt, every reason to question the 
benevolence of a fate that would raise such havoc with the symbol- 
ism of peace for which they had so persistently stood. 

[52] 



LUCY-LA-BOCAGE 

THE magnitude of destruction that the war has accomplished, and the 
thousands of pictures of this vast devastation that have passed before 
our eyes, have dulled our true appreciation of its awfulness. We have 
been surfeited with tales of horror and suffering until we are inclined to sum 
up our impressions of the total of these miseries and the mass of all this wide- 
spread destruction in a sort of blur of crumbled masonry and humbled 
humanity. But the supreme pitifulness of it is not evident to us until we 
have been brought into contact with some concrete example of what this loss 
and destruction mean. One could have no more impressive revelation of the 
fullness and bitterness of all this than the sight of refugees returning to their 
homes, to find their houses not only hopelessly smashed but more often 
entirely vanished in a pile of stone and timbers. I have seen old men and 
women, standing before the crumpled fragments of their homes, speechless 
and dazed, and in an attitude of utter despair. It was a sight that was pathetic 
beyond words. Lucy-Ia-Bocage is one of the villages south-west of Chateau- 
Thierry, which was in the wake of the German drive for Paris. When, not 
more than a month later, the tide of battle turned back, it left the place in 
ruins. This drawing shows one view of the town 
that greeted the returning villagers. 

[53] 



TORCY 

AFTER we had planted ourselves, outside of Chateau-Thierry, in front 
of the German wave that for the second time threatened to engulf Paris, 
^ we found ourselves face to face with the test of our abihty as fighters. 
General Pershing had so instilled into our men and officers the spirit of agres- 
siveness that we were not content on this occasion to use our strength merely 
defensively as a dam against the flood of German ambition. Instead, we 
started right in by clearing Belleau Wood, capturing Bouresches, and making 
a neat job of the taking of Vaux. After that we were content to rest until, 
foflowing the Germans' failure, on July 15th, to resume their march toward 
Paris, we advanced on the i8th in the general movement toward Soissons, 
which heralded the first step in Marshal Foch's gradual process of "roHing 
up the map." The village of Torcy and its neighbor, Befleau, fell to us on that 
day. The drawing shows the southern outskirts of the village and 
the ground our men traversed in taking their prize. 

[54] 



BOURESCHES 

THIS drawing was made in the main square of the village of Bouresches, 
which, situated on the edge of Belleau Wood, marked the southernmost 
hne of the wedge which the Germans had driven past Chateau-Thierry 
in their last push for Paris. This village, like others in the path of an enemy 
that was striding toward its goal at the rate of twenty to thirty kilometers a 
day, suffered from the sudden fury of war and had to endure the ebb and flow 
of fighting that marked, at this spot, the turning point of this tremendous 
conflict. No more impressive sign of its destruction could be found than the 
sight of the huge tree that at one time must have been the pride of the viHage. 
Its great branches severed, its trunk splintered and imbedded with shell 
fragments, it was hterally killed by sheH-fire. Bouresches was occupied by 
our forces at a time when it was still a new sensation for us to be stalking 
villages and capturing them. A little later we took Vaux with the neatness 
and dispatch of veterans, and from then on viHage- 
taking became a habit. 

[55] 



VAUX 

VAUX is an impressive example of American military efficiency. It was 
the first all-American experiment in ousting a tenacious enemy, and its 
success was complete although it cost the destruction of a village. But 
at that time, and under the circumstances of the force of the German thrust 
toward Paris, the price of a village, more or less, was hardly worth consider- 
ing. So, in capturing the place we did not hesitate to make a thorough job of 
it. The attack was planned in minute detail; through our intelfigence section 
we were able to learn the ins and outs of the town, the exact location of the 
houses whose cellars would offer the best shelter to the shell-hunted Huns. 
Postcards, old photographs, and the information of refugees enabled us to 
instruct the attacking forces in such detail that when in the wake of an artil- 
lery storm, which in its fullness and accuracy drummed every square yard of 
the town, they were able, with only slight resistance, to reap the harvest of 
prisoners in the very places in which we expected they would 
most certainly be found. 

[56] 



A ROLL CALL AFTER BATTLE 

ANYONE who had the opportunity of traveling back and forth between 
the front to the remote districts of our Services of Supplies could not 
^ help but observe a state of contrasting desires among the officers as 
well as the men. Those who had never been under fire were longing, heart and 
soul, for the opportunity to taste the thrill of it, while those who for days had 
survived the hell of battle and bombardment were longing, heart and soul, for 
the moment of their release. Which of these two was the more sincere expres- 
sion is open to speculation. The drawing shows the encampment of a battal- 
ion of marines, near Belleau Wood, enjoying relaxation from the strain of 
fighting. For the first time since their withdrawal from a zone which dis- 
courages close formations, these men were 
lined up for roll call. 

[57] 



REGIMENTAL HEADQUARTERS AT GRAND BALLIOS 



THE word "front" was comparative. It meant one thing to the man 
whose work was well in back of the lines and who beheved himself to be 
at the front when he was within sound of the guns, and it meant quite 
another thing to the doughboy who stood separated from the enemy by a 
few himps of dirt and a tangle of wire. A compromise between these two 
interpretations would establish this front zone as a strip of land that was 
measured by the depth of danger; and although it would primarily include 
the reach of the enemy's artillery fire, it should also take into consideration 
the areas exposed to air-raids. Add to this the distant places in the range of 
"Big Berthas" and "Mystery Guns" and you have a front the depth of which 
eludes exact measurement. And yet, the actual front was a wall that was 
unmistakable and which loomed up clear enough in one's consciousness when 
a point was reached where gas masks had to be worn in the "alert position," 
like a bib, and precaution made it necessary for one to walk single file through 
newly shelled fields at intervals of about a hundred feet between oneself and 
one's nearest companion. This drawing, which has an aspect of sunny tran- 
quillity, is of a group of farm buildings surrounding a courtyard which served 
as Colonel Dorey's headquarters near Chateau-Thierry, and which was near 
enough the front to make its approach a cautious undertaking. In the tower, 
which served as an excellent point of observation, a man can be seen watching 
for messages which were flashed to him from the edge of a wood that 
looked down upon the city of Chateau-Thierry. 

[58] 



A VIEW OF CHATEAU'THIERRY 

IN connection with this "World War," the name of Chateau-Thierry will 
forever stand in our memories as the proving ground of American valor. 
The long months of watchfulness in our trenches in the Vosges, the sharp 
and bitter struggle at Seicheprey, the show of splendid courage and fighting 
at Cantigny which marked our first encounter with the Germans on their way 
to Paris, all these were overshadowed by the triumph of our faith in our arms 
when we put our untried strength to the fullest test against the Chateau- 
Thierry sahent, and found it not unworthy of our highest hopes. In our 
minds thereafter, we saw Chateau-Thierry as the gate which, held by our 
unfaihng strength, barred the Germans from their hopes of victory and peace. 
And although they made one more effort to break this barrier, it failed; and 
when this gate was opened again it swung wide to give way to the charge of 
our triumphant forces in pursuit of a beaten enemy. Chateau-Thierry was 
the flood-gate that marked the turning of the war. The drawing gives one an 
idea of the location of the city in its setting of hills. The River Marne is not 
visible, but is marked by the Hne of taller buildings above the 
row of trees in the center of the picture. 

[59] 



THE BRIDGE AT CHATEAU-THIERRY 

THE bridge was destroyed by the French in June, 191 8, as an obstacle 
against the German advance when, for the second time, the enemy made 
its drive toward Paris. It spanned the Marne in three arches and carried 
the roadway which, had it not been for the superb resistance of our Seventh 
Machine Gun Battalion of the Third Division, would have opened for the 
Germans the road to Montmirail and the highway that leads straight 
to Paris. In the other direction, here pictured, the bridge leads into the 
center of the city and to the square of the Hotel de Ville, with its steep 
stairs leading to the terrace and grounds of the long-ago ruined chateau. 
That the town itself is not much damaged by shell-fire is, perhaps, due 
to the fact that the chateau grounds are. Again, as in the past, the violence 
of battle fell chiefly here, and the accuracy of our artillery fire is made evi- 
dent by the sight of battered walls, fallen trees, and German graves. But 
the picture-spot of the city was its blown-up bridge, and so important 
was this bridge as an artery of traffic in the pursuit of the enemy that, no 
sooner were the Germans out of town, the work was started on clearing away 
the fallen masonry and spanning the bridge anew 
with wooden trestles. 

[60] 



GERMAN SHELTERS 

THE super-soldier of the future, if Kultur had had its way, would have 
probably developed into a creature resembhng a turreted turtle with 
the drilling powers of a mole. He could have shot and dug in before he 
was shot at, and thus satisfy a craving that has been in the heart of almost 
every soldier, at least once, who has had anything to do with an active battle 
front. Digging "fox holes" with a bayonet, or mess-kit cover, or the brim of 
your "tin hat," takes time, and very often ends in a grim failure. Along the 
wake of a pursuing battle such as followed our counter-offensive in the 
Chateau-Thierry sector and in our fighting in the Argonne, no more vivid 
proof is shown of the certain danger into which the soldier must continually 
advance than by these hurried scratchings in upland fields and sheltered 
banks. And what meager protection they too often gave was made evident 
by the sight of an occasional rifle and helmet that marked the spot where 
some poor boy paid the full forfeit of his patriotism. The digging for shelter 
is a universal practice of self-protection, and the extent of the finished struc- 
ture depends upon the duration of its occupancy. This drawing shows some 
of the German dug-outs on the slope of Hill 204 outside of the city of Chateau- 
Thierry. Some of these lead to deep and spacious holes, while others are 
barely large enough to afford shelter for one man. 

[61] 



A BRIDGE AT JAULGONNE 

SO unconsciously do we accept the services of bridges that we give to them 
no more thought than we do to the foundations of a highway. But find 
yourself once in a zone that has been traversed by a retreating army and 
you will be astonished to learn how many bridges there are, or rather were, 
and how vital their existence is to your progress. To have to choose this road 
or that one because one bridge is down and another is not, or, worse yet, to 
find yourself suddenly halted by a chasm marked by pylons and a twisting of 
cables and beams, and to have to retrace your steps over miles of bumpy 
roads, makes you have a very high regard for the builders of bridges and a 
very low one for those who destroy them. The drawing shows the remains of 
the bridge at Jaulgonne which was blown up in June, 19 18, against the 
German advance. It marks the approximate location of the junction of our 
sector (3rd Division) with the French. Just below it, our engineers built a 
pontoon bridge out of enemy material under enemy fire and 
labeled it "Made in Germany." 

[62] 



THE SECOND BATTLE OF THE MARNE 

AS an example of the most superb military efficiency, our defense of the 
Surmelin Valley by the 38th Regiment (3rd Division) under Colonel 
^ McAIexander, which resulted in the repulse of the German forces and 
the total annihilation of the 6th German Grenadiers east of Mezy, stands 
unrivaled in the records of American fighting. But aside from a demonstra- 
tion of the tenacity and aggressiveness of our men and methods, this encounter 
and defeat of the enemy constituted, without doubt, one of the most vital 
factors in the failure of the enemy's last attempt to smash its way to Paris. 
This drawing, with its notations, gives one a view of the Marne and the 
battleground around the village of Mezy. It shows where the Germans 
under the obscurity of the dim morning light, and behind a veil of smoke, 
started to cross the Marne. The hail of our artillery and rifle-fire delayed 
them in their efforts to embark, and resulted in the destruction and sinking 
of at least twenty of their crowded boats. When at last a crossing was effected 
by the 6th German Grenadiers it was only after every man in the platoon that 
held the rifle pits on the river bank had given his life in his effort to prevent 
their landing. And even then, the enemy enjoyed but a short triumph. His 
advance along the avenue of small trees that opened into the wheat field west 
of the Mezy church was halted by the viciousness of our attack from the rail- 
road bank which formed the line of our resistance. Over the embankment the 
men of Company H poured in three waves, a platoon at a time, and closed 
with the enemy in a hand-to-hand encounter until the Germans, believing 
our forces to be in greater numbers than they had 
anticipated, gave up the fight. 

[63] 




\2^t^^!£^:^^i}h^ ^.^ .^.i^:^^ ,^^^. .^ 



1<v<.W.> j 



WHERE THE GERMANS CROSSED THE MARNE 

A NEARER view of the river bank on the Marne where the 6th German 
Grenadiers finally succeeded in making a crossing. A brief description 
of this action is given on the preceding page. This drawing shows the 
village of Charteves in the background, while in the immediate foreground is 
one of the two-men rifle pits which were dug at intervals along the river bank 
and formed our first line of resistance to the approaching enemy. The supreme 
courage of the men who occupied these pits, and gave their lives in their 
effort to prevent the enemy's landing, is exemphfied by the cool action of 
Corporal Connor, who, on the approach of a boatload of Germans, shpped 
from the snug protection of his pit and, crouching in the tangle of reeds and 
bushes, waited until the boat was within his reach. He then pulled it toward 
him, and before the astounded Germans knew what had happened he had 
showered them with hand-grenades. That is the story of the failure 
of one boat to land its Paris-bound passengers. 

[64] 



AVIEWOFMEZY 

THE drawing was made from the hills on the north bank of the Marne 
which were occupied by the Germans, and down which they scrambled 
on the morning of July i6th, 191 8, on what they had hoped would be 
the last leg of their trip to Paris. Across the river can be seen the church in 
Mezy, while to the left of it is the railroad embankment which formed the 
chief line of resistance of that dauntless company of the 38th Regiment which 
utterly routed the 6th German Grenadiers. In the distance can be seen the 
pleasant hills of pastures and woodland where the Germans had planned to 
reorganize their forces, after their tempestuous crossing of the Marne, and 
move forward in an orderly manner toward Montmirail and the high- 
road that leads by way of Meaux to Paris. 

[65I 



r^ 



'>*"^»t%^«liUU^., Jte 




A MOBILE HOSPITAL 

THE system of medical service for our sick and wounded extended from 
the huge base hospitals near our ports up through a string of other base 
hospitals, each a step nearer the front, to the evacuation hospitals, and 
from these to the field hospitals, dressing stations, advance dressing stations, 
and so on, out to the foremost firing line where medical officers were assigned 
to special units. This drawing shows Mobile Hospital Number 39, the "Yale 
Unit," located, at the time the drawing was made, at Chaillons, where it was 
stationed in service with the Second Army. To these field hospitals were 
brought only those men whose wounds were of such a serious nature as to 
necessitate an immediate operation. The "Mobile" Hospital is an adapta- 
tion of the French "autochir" a war development whereby the various 
operating and ward tents with their complete equipment could be struck, 
set upon trucks and trailers, and be on the road in an hour's time. 

[66] 



A CORNER IN ESSEY 

THE intricate system of army intelligence robbed modern warfare of the 
element of surprise. Aside from minor skirmishes and counter-attacks 
by small units, it is doubtful if any important movement of either army 
was effected without having been, in some degree, anticipated. The best 
that [one could hope for was to keep the opponent guessing and, with 
good luck, trust that he would guess wrong. And although the precautions 
seemed at times to be too obvious and even ridiculous, nevertheless every 
effort was made to maintain a secrecy that seemed to ignore the exist- 
ence of snooping aeroplanes and the mysterious workings of the enemy's 
system of espionage. Preceding an offensive, along the front and immediately 
in back of it, everything had the appearance of innocent calm, except that 
there seemed to be in the air a premonition of something brewing, and otFicers 
were apt to wear that guileless expression that one associates with the face of 
the small boy with the hidden snow-balL The M. P.'s were the best indicators 
of coming trouble. Their vigilance grew more bothersome, and whereas before 
the roads were open, more or less, to uninterrupted travel, you now found 
yourself halted at brief intervals and forced to submit to the always embar- 
rassing efforts on the part of the M. P. to find a passable resemblance between 
your face and the representation of it on your identification card. But after 
the first boom of guns that opened an offensive, the lid of secrecy was off; the 
roads swarmed with life pressing toward the front, and there was a bustle and 
confusion which seemed all the more marked because of the calm that had 
preceded it. The drawing shows a corner in the village of Essey on the second 
day of the St. Mihiel drive. It pictures merely a small fragment of the endless 
procession of wagons, motors and men that swarmed the roads 
on the heels of the Hun-hunting doughboys. 

[67] 



RAMBUCOURT 

RAMBUCOURT was on our "jumping-off" line in the St. Mihiel drive. 
Along with its neighbor, the village of Beaumont, it had a reputation 
for being an unhealthy spot, and many of our men had their first bap- 
tism of German hate under the doubtful protection of its walls. The German 
contention that every church tower, from the Cathedral of Rheims to the most 
humble village spire, was an observation post is only too evident here. With 
a huge shell-bite in its side, this tower offered an interesting speculation on 
how long it would withstand the shock of battle. As a matter of fact, it 
survived, but the church itself and the houses around it seem 
to be hopelessly beyond repair. 

[68] 



"'•'Wm^WP^WWII^PPf!^* 




BEYOND SEICHEPREY 

OUR troops are seen advancing, during the St. Mihiel offensive, into the 
vast plain which, ever since the Germans took it in the early days of 
the war, had been dominated by the guns on Mont Sec. With the 
Germans in retreat, their artillery silenced, our advance into this wide sweep 
of No-man's Land carried with it more than the thrill of a victorious pursuit; 
it was a tremendous adventure. After months and months of impatient wait- 
ing in wet trenches from which the doughboy and the general alike would 
scowl across untilled fields and plan the capture of this billigerent mountain, 
we were free at last to scramble above ground and step out with a man's 
stride into the realization of a dream. Our wish had come true : Mont Sec had 
fallen and the forbidden fields were now open to us. The drawing shows a 
German communication trench in the foreground; on the right are companies 
of infantry trailing across the fields in order to keep the roads open for 
wheeled traffic. On the left, against the 
horizon, is Mont Sec. 

[69] 



OVER NO-MAN'S LAND 

TO follow an offensive on a battle-map over a staggering of pins, that run 
across a line of villages with unpronounceable names, is not unhke watch- 
ing a baseball game through the medium of a bulletin board. It is an 
exasperating strain on one's imagination, and the degree of impatience that 
you suffer from the bald announcement of the muffing of a fly in left-field 
which you cannot see being muffed, in fact or reason, is magnified in one's 
helpless speculation over why a certain inward bend in your line of pins 
should not at once be rounded out with a generous curve into the enemy's 
country. To the average battle-map warrior the area in back of the front is 
a vast macadamized plain devoted to an unhmited expanse of reserve forces 
and supphes. With him, roads do not exist; they count not at alL This draw- 
ing shows one "fragment of France" where roads did count, and especiafly 
the lack of them. It was over a strip of shell-ruptured ground in the St. 
Mihiel sector that had for four years been No-man's Land. And before we 
could traverse it we had to build roads around mine craters and across trench 
Hnes while miles of wagons and motors jammed the 
back roads and waited. 

[70] 



FLIREY 

IT was interesting at times to contemplate the discrimination exercised by 
an exploding shell, and this, too, in spite of the indiscrimination of Ger- 
man artillerymen. The same chance that would, for example, kill two 
men in a group of three would demohsh a row of houses and leave one in 
their midst untouched. In both cases it was probably a matter of time when 
all men and all houses would have been smashed to oblivion. The more 
impressive cases, such as crucifixes that have withstood years of battle-fire, 
are, after all, only the rare exceptions and evoke our wonder for that reason; 
the fallen crucifixes — and how many of them there must have been — set our 
thoughts along other channels in anger rather than wonder. The village of 
Flirey suffered a fairly uniform degree of destruction; not a home was spared, 
and most of the houses have but a broken wall fragment to mark their loca- 
tion. But in this particular, Flirey is no different from hundreds of other 
towns. Whereas most of the ruined villages were depressingly ugly in the 
cruel regularity of their destruction, Flirey possessed one unique structure, a 
church tower that was built upon a rise of ground. Seen from below, with its 
one side torn open along its entire length, it cut against the sky in a grim 
silhouette, skeleton-like, and seemed to stand as a monument to German 
methods of warfare. The drawing shows the tower seen from the road above 
the village; from here its frail gracefulness is not apparent. What the German 
shells failed to do the winter winds have since accomplished and 
the tower is now only a memory. 

[71] 



THE CROSSROADS AT FLIREY 

THE road to victory is a rough one, figuratively as well as literally. To 
have stood by the edge of a road during an offensive and watched a train 
of wagons or trucks in their convulsion of rocking and swaying progress, 
sloughing through channels of mud, or dipping into shell-holes with a sudden- 
ness that threatened their complete overturn, gave one a clearer sense of at 
least one phase of a staff officer's worries. His job was to see that everything 
kept moving in support of the attacking forces, and more than once he has 
been known to envy the commander of infantry who had God's wide acres to 
spread his men over, even though these broad highways were visited with 
danger and death. To make the roadways passable was the task of our engi- 
neer and pioneer regiments. The drawing shows a cross-road where a com- 
pany of these men can be seen pulling down a wall, the stones of which were 
used to fill in the larger shell-holes, to widen the roads and make 
them smoother, and, above all, faster for travel. 

[72] 



NO-MAN'S LAND REGAINED 

THE background of war was never more vast and impressive than in the 
St. Mihiel sector on the crest of the hill between the villages of Flirey 
and Essey. Here the war had settled itself in the first few weeks of 
fighting, and here it had remained until that September morning in 191 8 
when, more by the threat of our numbers than the need of our arms, we 
straightened our front past the St. Mihiel sahent. From the fine of our 
trenches we stepped into a redeemed No-man's Land and found ourselves 
pushing along roads that had stood untraveled for years, or across a vast 
prairie of weed-tangled fields that had been planted with wire and plowed by 
shells. It was the ugfiest piece of France that I have ever seen. But on the 
hillcrest, overlooking the mist and smoke-filled plains, and with the straight, 
long ridge of Mont Sec rimming the horizon, and all about you, before your 
eyes, beneath your feet, the tortured earth, slashed with crumbling trench 
lines, furrowed by the force of shells, and bristling with stakes and prickling 
wire, while overhead a sky darkened with low-hanging clouds that trailed 
sheets of sudden rain, or opened for the quick flash of sunshine — here was a 
setting of solemn magnificence ... a true 
background of war. 

[73] 



A ROAD IN MONT SEC 

A PICTORIAL record of a war would not be complete if it lacked the 
portraitof a road. The roadways of France have always stood in our 
minds for smoothness and the assurance of a swift and easy passage. 
So it was before the war, and so it is still until you reach the zones that have 
suffered from the congestion of war traffic. And here the long strain of heavy 
travel, the endless run of motor trains, rains, and the untended wear and tear, 
have done steady damage until the roads have become rutted and pitted and 
cupped with holes which increased in number and roughness the nearer that 
one approached the front. Inside the range of enemy artillery fire this inevi- 
table roughness was punctuated by shell-holes of various sizes, and although 
our engineers would level these with loose dirt and stone, nevertheless the 
travel along these shell-hammered lanes was apt to be a tempestuous proces- 
sion. The road here pictured is a byway in the village of Mont Sec; for years 
it was a street in No-man's Land, and with its fringe of naked walls, scraggly 
partitions of crumbling masonry that once were houses and homes, the draw- 
ing gives one an idea of the task that waits for those who must 
rebuild the desolated areas of France. 

[74] 



ON THE ROAD TO THIAUCOURT 

IT is the Pont-a-Mousson-Thiaucourt road, and it is just where it takes a 
dip downward into a plain of desolation where once stood the village of 
Regnieville. Nothing but the fragment of a tower and a few jagged walls 
are left now to prove the town's existence. The view from here and along the 
road is a typical war landscape . . . hideous and depressing. The road itself, 
a channel of mud, the trees that once hned it now smashed and spHntered and 
for the greater part entirely gone, and the ground on either side stretching to 
the horizon in a turbulence of upheaval, slashed with trenches, cupped with 
shell-holes, and encumbered with tangled wire and the unsightly refuse of 
scattered shelters, this is what the war had made of 
tree-shaded roadways and lovely pastures! 

[75] 



THIAUCOURT 

A FTER we had nipped off the St. Mihiel salient in our "bloodless offen- 

Z-V sive," and our two forces which had been squeezing the sides of this 

*- *■ triangle had joined hands north of Mont Sec, our new front ran from 

Pont-a-Mousson in a sweep that joined the old French lines east of Verdun. 

In a period of two days we had restored to France about a hundred and fifty 

square miles of "Germany," including the city of St. Mihiel and many other 

grateful towns and villages. Of these towns, VigneuIIes and Thiaucourt were 

the largest. Until a few days before the armistice, when our Second Army 

had started a new push toward Metz, our front line 

ran just north of Thiaucourt. 

[76] 



A SALVAGE DEPOT AT THE FRONT 

THE impulse that draws us to the window of a curio shop, and more than 
likely brings us into the store to buy trash we do not need, has its 
parallel in the attraction one has at the front for even the most trivial pile 
of salvage. The call of the salvage dump is almost irresistible, and is answered, 
sooner or later, by every human being from the straggling doughboy to the 
joy-riding Senator. Here are gathered a conglomerated mass of captured or 
discarded equipment, and it is, no doubt, the dramatic and tragic circum- 
stance of its presence there that gives to this mass of war junk a glamour 
that arouses in us the insatiable desire of possession. "Souvenir hunting" is 
a shorter name for it. Battlefields still fresh with the signs of fighting are 
seldom free from the scuffling searchers who, criss-crossing through the grass, 
are held enrapt with the thrill and hope of the discovery of some rare treasure. 
Eventually the bulk of undesired material reaches a depot designated for its 
reception, where it is sorted and officially disposed of. The drawing 
shows one of these depots in the rums of Fhrey. 

[77] 



PONT-A-MOUSSON 

WITH Pont-a-Mousson the gateway into Lorraine, and Lorraine one- 
half the bone of contention, it is natural that in 1870, as well as in 
this war, it should have suffered the fate of the innocent bystander. 
In terms of punctured roofs and broken glass, the damage done to this place 
was considerable. But the town will live to see itself patched and plastered 
into the semblance of unity and respectability and then will take up its old 
life again and pin its faith of an enduring future on the 
League of Nations. 

[78] 



KEMMEL 

A TRAVELER through the devastated areas of northern France and 
Flanders will find his road map of httle use to him if he happens to be 
in search of a village that has stood too squarely in the path of war. 
If he is alert and keeps both eyes open and has checked the distance that he 
has traversed, he may be able to distinguish above the general eruption of 
shell-holes a few beams and a pile of stones to mark the place he is looking for. 
Even then he will not be entirely certain whether he has found the powdered 
remains of an entire village or just a single farm house a few miles from the 
place that he is actually in search of. The result of persistent bombardment 
is, in the end, pretty much the same; it reduces everything to a neutral-tinted 
churning of dirt in waves and whirlpools like a brown sea that has suddenly 
become rigid. Usually the last building of a village to succumb is the church. 
But this is out of no consideration for its spiritual significance, but because of 
its physical endurance; it has a tower and higher walls and thicker masonry, 
and it takes more shells to hammer it flat. That is why when every other sign 
of a village has vanished the church may still hold up some fragment of its 
tower above the waves of dirt like the forlorn gesture of a drowning man. 
Although the village of Kemmel did not suffer a complete return to dust, 
nevertheless the church was about the only recognizable landmark upon 
which a stranger could with any degree of certainty pin his belief in the 
existence of the place; that and the fact that Mount Kemmel could be seen 
rising in the distance. The drawing shows this view of Kemmel and the 
mountain in back which will always stand as one of the 
famous conquests of our 27th Division. 

[79] 



A STREET IN BELLICOURT 

THIS drawing was made after the signing of the armistice, after the sound 
of the guns had ceased, and after the soldiers had been withdrawn from 
these crumpled villages and long before the country had been opened 
again to the civihan population. It was a place of depressing solitude and 
desolation. Here one felt the cold silence of death; not a sound reached one's 
ears, and one's eyes could find nothing that even suggested the presence of 
human Hfe. The thought that not so long ago this street had known the 
laughter of children at play was now inconceivable. And, after all, this was but 
one street in only one of the hundreds of villages which have suffered the full 
horror of war. This drawing was made in the village of Bellicourt, which was 
captured by our 30th Division, which, together with the 27th, assisted the 
British in smashing through Von Hindenburg's "impregnable" maze of wire 
and trenches. The road shown here leads to St. Quentin; the St. Quentin 
Canal is to the right and runs parallel to this road and 
within a few yards of the backs of these houses. 

[80] 



iM«Saf3fSIB9B''S5J 




ST. QUENTIN CANAL 

A SKETCH of the St. Quentin Canal at Bellicourt. This canal, with high, 
steep banks, acted as a huge moat to the Hindenburg defenses. At 
Belhcourt it goes under ground for a distance of several miles, and 
served the Germans only too well as a shelter and garrison large enough to 
accommodate a vast number of troops and supphes. It lay in the path of our 
divisions in their attack with the British against the Hindenburg line, and 
added one more obstacle in a fight that called forth the best that we 
had in courage, unflinching aggressiveness and leadership. 

[8i] 



A STRETCH OF FLANDERS 

THE background of our fighting, which extended, with a few interrup- 
tions, from Italy to the north of Russia, offered an exceedingly varied 
setting of architecture and scenery. Belgium gave us windmills to shoot 
at. This sketch was made on the edge of the town of Audenard, and marks 
our hne of observation on the night preceding the day 
we went down the hill and captured the place. 

[82] 



AUDENARD 

THIS is the main square of the town of Audenard, which was the prize 
capture of the men of the 91st Division, when in November, during the 
last round of the "Big Fight," they assisted in restoring Belgium to the 
Belgians. It is a unique capture in that it is the largest 
city that fell before American arms. 

[83] 



VERDUN 

IN recalling the tenacious resistance of Verdun, we are, perhaps, inchned to 
imagine the city itself as the impregnable barrier that withstood the 
German assault and omit from our consideration the ring of forts that 
were actually the vital instruments of opposition to the German advance. 
\\ e think of Verdun as one of the "slaughtered" cities of France, and imagine 
it a tumble of masonry, hke Lens and "\'pres. As a matter of fact, Verdun is 
not a dead city. It is desperately wounded, but in time will recover. This 
drawing, of course, gives no idea of the details of destruction; but it shows 
that the town has been left standing with more walls 
and roofs than we had beheved possible. 

[84] 



A WINDOW IN VERDUN 

HERE is the picture of a French window which has suffered the fate of 
a thousand other French windows that have opened their casements 
into the face of war. But if it were in the nature of windows to be 
envious, there must have been many a window along the lesser battlefronts 
that would have given their glass for the view that this one boasted. It is one 
of the windows in the bishop's palace at Verdun and looks out 
across one of the greatest battlefields of all times. 



THE ARGONNE COUNTRY 

TO the layman the art of trench warfare was fairly open to comprehen- 
sion. He recognized it as a game where there were distinctly two sides, 
each occupying trenches that the other wanted, and each offering 
enough obstacles in the nature of barbed wire, hand-grenades, etc., to make 
their capture difficult. So long as there were trench lines and ribbons of wire 
to designate them, the rules of the game were evident; but the moment one 
side had pushed the other beyond these ditches and into the open, the whole 
aspect of the game was changed. No longer could he see the "sides," nor 
could his imagination picture the invisible line of division that separated, by 
hill and dale, one group of antagonists from the other. The maintenance of 
"contact" between separate units along the front is a necessity which would 
seem obvious to him, and yet one that impressed him as being almost 
impossible of execution, especially where the natural instinct of an advancing 
force is that of stealth and concealment. You can keep in contact with some- 
thing that you can see, but if you cannot see it — well, the result is only too 
obvious: Lost companies, lost battalions, lost regiments, and lost battles! And 
although many emergency-made officers (even though they might not be will- 
ing to admit it) have, no doubt, suffered at times the layman's inability to 
grasp the principles of open warfare, one needs but look across the sweeping 
acres of battlefields, such as we encountered in the Argonne sector, to realize 
the difficulties that this method of fighting presented and to sympathize with 
their task of leadership. This drawing was made above Buzancy and 
looking north in the direction of Sedan and the end of the war. 

[86] 



VARENNES 

PROBABLY the most outstanding feature, topographically, of the Argonne- 
Meuse sector is its many mountainous sites for the location of its towns 
and villages. Rising sharply out of a modeling of rolling country, these 
precipitous hummocks formed formidable points of resistance, a series of 
natural strongholds that made our advance through this sector one of the 
most astounding accomplishments of the war. That our progress should have 
been slow and expensive is only natural; that it was possible at all is, perhaps, 
open to greater wonder. This sketch of Varennes, a town which we captured 
on the first day of the offensive, gives one an idea of the 
nature of these fortress-like villages. 

[87] 



ST. JUVIN 

AFTER the men of the Seventy-seventh Division, citified New Yorkers 
whose previous knowledge of forests had not extended much beyond 
^ the orderly boundaries of Bronx Park, had made a clean sweep of the 
Argonne wilderness (the nastiest battleground in France) it added as a full 
measure of its accomplishment the capture of the village of St. Juvin. It was 
no easy job. St. Juvin was on the second line of the Kriemhilde defenses, and 
had the advantage of position on high ground with the precipitous walls of 
the citadel of Grand Pre as a vantage point for any attempted advance from 
the forest in that direction. And although the town had resisted three pre- 
vious efforts on our part to take it, it finally fell to these city-bred men, who, 
after pushing through the Argonne's natural tangle of thickets and the Ger- 
man artificial tangle of barbed wire, rejoiced in an "open-air" fight, with a 
clean-cut goal in sight, and with only a few shells and machine-guns to keep 
them from it. In less than an hour after they had started the job it was 
finished and paid for with a neat bag of 
prisoners as souvenirs. 



GRAND PRE 

OUR Argonne-Meuse battle, besides being one of the chief contributions 
to the ending of the war, was for us a record fight, the largest in 
American history. Topographically it marked another record: This 
strip of France which was turned over to us for capture was, on the whole, the 
most treacherous and difficult battleground on the entire Western Front. It 
was a country that not only rolled but took sudden plunges into ravines or 
threw up sharp rising plateaux and was spotted with woods that were a tangle 
of jungle-like growth. It was an area where one did not figure one's progress 
in terms of towns. Towns and villages, somehow, seemed incidental to the 
general lay of the land; woods and hills are what counted, especially the 
woods. It was nasty going all the way. Pictorially it offered little that was 
distinctive to mark the progress of our advance, aside from the monotony of 
rugged country and forests. There were few large towns in the path of our 
fighting and the smaller ones, in their architectural aspect, were not marked 
by any distinctive monuments, or if they had been in the past, the devasta- 
tion of war had reduced them all to a sort of uniform monotony of destruc- 
tion: Houses with punctured roofs, or without roofs, like a row of shattered 
boxes. Of the larger towns Grand Pre was the most distinguished. It is 
situated at the northern tip of the Argonne Forest and marks the division 
between it and the Bourgogne Forest to the north. It was a hot place; the 
Germans were slow to relinquish it, and the town changed hands several 
times before we were finally able to make it our own. And in this back-and- 
forth struggle Grand Pre was mauled and battered and stirred up as if by one 
of our western tornadoes, and for that matter it was, only worse ... it was 
struck by the fury of the "Jersey Lightnings" in the 
shape of the 78th Division. 

[89] 



A DUMP AT DUN-SUR-MEUSE 

THE background of war offers very little that satisfies the eye from the 
standpoint of beauty. Moonlight, if it does not bring with it the dis- 
traction of an air-raid, can set its spell of mystery on the most sordid 
subject, whether it shines upon a world at peace or at war. Gun-flashes (if 
they are numerous enough), the play of searchlights and the drifting stars of 
signal rockets will move you to a realization of loveHness which is born of the 
old dehght in fireworks. Occasionally a sweep of landscape enhvened by 
troops, or some monumental ruin rising against a bank of clouds will carry 
your interest above the dull elements that compose it. But, as a whole, the 
background of war is a confusing mass of drab-colored dreariness. There are 
too many miles of tree-smashed roads, too many acres of mud and ruptured 
fields, too many villages of monotonous ruins, too many long wooden bar- 
racks, ammunition dumps, storage piles, horse sheds — in fact, too much of 
everything that is sordid, colorless and ugly. And yet, it is all a part of the 
picture, a vital setting of this tremendous performance of war. And so it must 
be drawn. This sketch is a typical example of the unlovehness that one con- 
stantly encounters. It is a sort of general dump for supphes, and a gasoHne 
depot. In the foreground is a horse that has passed the stage of 
usefulness and has been turned loose to live or die. 

[90] 



A MINE CRATER 

PERHAPS the most decent tribute to a defeated army, judging the game 
of war purely from the technical side, is to praise its manner of retreat. 
In this particular the Germans were open to rounds of applause. In the 
Argonne sector, where it was our pleasure to "speed the parting pest," as one 
wit put it, the enemy extricated himself methodically under the protection of 
machine-guns placed in positions that formed ugly barriers to our advance. 
In addition to these defenses, the customary methods of road destruction 
were followed by the use of mines or by digging wide trenches intended as 
tank traps. The result is the obvious delay in road traffic so vital to the 
support of an advancing army. This drawing shows the remnants of a road 
northwest of Buzancy . Five or six craters of this size so completely destroyed 
the use of this roadway that it became necessary to skirt this break with a 
newly made road. The task that our engineers had to face was difficult to 
accomphsh because of the softness of the ground at this point, which, to give 
the Boche his due, was, no doubt, why this section of the 
road had been selected for destruction. 

[91] 



Tl 
1 



DUN-SUR'MEUSE 

'HE last act of our fighting opened on November ist, when our whole 
front took a jump forward and broke the German line. After that, it 
was down grade to victory. Men who had been fighting through a maze 
of jungles and machine-guns could now step out with a full stride and with 
heads up. Motor-trucks had to hustle to keep up with the infantry. Only on 
our right was the procession retarded. There we had to cross the Meuse and 
the Meuse Canal and take Dun, which, hke so many other towns in this 
fighting zone of ours, sat on a hilltop and defied us. But we were in a hurry; 
the chance of an armistice at that time was only a faint rumor; it was no 
business of the fighting man, especially with the Germans on the run and the 
frontiers of the Vaterland just one step over the horizon. And so when the 
Fifth Division had orders to "Go through Dun . . . push things along," they 
did, although it was bitter going and hard pushing. This sketch of Dun was 
made along the canal and shows the start of the steeply rising 
hill upon which the main part of the town is built. 

[92] 



-rrnsaBEr^r 







A FIELD ENCAMPMENT 

ONLY those who have felt the tangible darkness at the front, nights 
when the blackness was a sohd that pressed against your eyes and 
confused your senses, when you stumbled along roads and only 
through the grace of a sixth sense that you never before possessed, avoided 
collision with man and beast and motor-truck, only then could you fully 
appreciate one of the blessings of the cessation of hostilities : The resto- 
ration of light. ReUeved from the dull threat of suffering or death, one 
was quick to take the fuller joy in the regained freedom of simple acts — fires 
at night, hghted roadways, and the immunity from all the petty restric- 
tions that governed your hfe for its own preservation. But best of all was 
one's resurrection from the narrow confinement of trenches and dug-outs into 
God's open country, to stand erect without menace and danger, to feel against 
your face the freshness of unpoisoned breezes, and to look once more without 
dread upon the fullness of the moon. This sketch, which shows a return 
to "open-air" life after the armistice, is a field encampment in the 
Argonne-Meuse sector on the outskirts of Dun-sur-Meuse. 

[93] 



A VIEW OF LUXEMBOURG 

FROM the point of view of the people of Luxembourg our apologetic use 
of their country as a thoroughfare into Germany, preceded by a polite 
proclamation explaining the military necessity of our temporary and 
friendly invasion, was open to two degrees of acceptance: Those who wel- 
comed us with open arms and those who merely welcomed us. In the city 
of Luxembourg there was no doubt in the minds of the "advance guard" of 
our officers and men of the nature of their reception. It was overwhelming in 
its generosity. And if our soldiers ever tasted the glorious thrill of "conquer- 
ing heroes" it was on this occasion when the people of Luxembourg laid the 
city at their feet, opened their houses to them, and wined and dined them 
into the wee small hours of morn. This drawing, made in the city of Luxem- 
bourg, gives one some conception of the unusual site upon which the city is 
built, the precipitous cliffs which form the foundation for the main portion of 
the town, and the bridges and viaducts that span the ravines and 
give to the place its unique charm. 

[94] 



ON THE MOSELLE 

THE act of stepping into Germany was planned by the Allied armies as a 
concerted action, designed from no consideration to avoid the embarrass- 
ment of choice in the order of their entrance, but guided by straight 
military procedure. Accordingly, our various armies placed themselves along 
the German frontier, brushed their clothes, poHshed their boots and, in 
general, rubbed up their military manners which, during the last few months 
of intensive warfare, had suffered from neglect. During this period in which 
we awaited the signal to advance, a trip along the banks of the Moselle River, 
which marked the boundary between Luxembourg and Germany, revealed 
an energetic return to close-order drill, guard mount, and a revival of the 
habit and art of saluting. In the meantime, separated only by a river that we 
might call a stream if we did not call it a creek, were the vine-clad 
hills of Germany — our great objective. 

[95] 



ECHTERNACH 

THE honor of having been the first man to cross into Germany is one that 
was probably disputed by several thousand men. One could not walk 
along the banks of the Moselle that marked the boundary between 
Luxembourg and Germany without a desire to reach the opposite side and 
enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that you were at last in the enemy's country 
and also that you were there in advance of several hundred thousand other 
men who were possessed of the same desire. At the bridges, this impulse to 
cross in advance of the authorized army order would take the form of a mad 
longing to rush the guards or by sweet words and the display of important- 
looking papers beguile the sentries into a confusion of their authority and in 
this way effect a crossing. To what extent this was attempted, only the 
guardhouse records would show. Of the several towns that marked our 
bridgeways into Germany, Echternach was the largest. It is situated on the 
Sure River, several miles above its junction 
with the Moselle. 

[96] 



A 



A CORNER IN BREMM 

GERMAN village on the Moselle which, although "crumbling with 
age," formed a bitter contrast to those villages which the Germans had 
crumbled with shells and fire and the vile tricks of destruction that 
marked the progress of their invasion. 

[97] 



A VIEW OF MONTABAUR 

THE smaller towns in the zone of occupation that fell to our lot were not 
especially attractive. Seen at a distance, they were quite suggestive of 
our own suburban towns. But they were generally clean, or appeared 
to be clean in contrast with the towns and villages at the front which formed 
our standard of comparison. To the doughboy, with whom a little beauty, 
more or less, did not matter, they were in most cases wholly acceptable in his 
eyes because they oflFered him billets that were high and dry and water-proof, 
and also all the thoughtful attentions of people who were anxious to have 
their solicitude reach the ear of the Peace Conference. This drawing shows 
a view of Montabaur which, in its setting and the quaintness of many of its 
houses, came very near satisfying one's preconceived idea of 
what a Rhine town should look like. 

[98] 



COBLENZ 

THOSE who expected that the entrance of our troops into Coblenz would 
be a military pageant, a sortof "here-the-conquering-heroes-come, "with 
bands playing, flags flying, and all the stage trappings of a victorious 
entry, were, no doubt, sorely disappointed. That the Germans expected us to 
enter in this way is likely, knowing their habits and inclinations where mili- 
tary functions are concerned. And this belief was substantiated by the 
marked emptiness of the streets as the hour scheduled for our entrance drew 
near. But instead of a procession of triumph, our men made their entrance 
into town quietly, but with a suddenness and completeness that filled the 
streets in every direction that one looked. For the few German citizens who 
were caught out in the streets and were unable to hide their heads the 
suddenness and all-pervading presence of our troops must have been an 
impressive sight, and to those who kept behind shuttered windows the 
sound of our marching columns must have cut deep into their pride and have 
awakened memories too bitter for comparison. The drawing shows the river 
front at Coblenz with the huge hotel which served as Third Army Head- 
quarters on the right, while in the street and beyond the rail, on the 
pontoon bridge, are seen our wagon-trains crossing the Rhine. 

[99] 



CROSSING THE RHINE 

SECOND to Berlin, the Rhine became in the minds of both citizen and 
soldier the most popular objective of our Allied armies in their drive for 
victory. With the Germans pushed back across the Rhine and our 
triumphant armies turning the tables of destruction on to the Vaterland, the 
end of the war would be merely a matter of days . . . and joyous days at 
that. For that reason the armistice, which halted hostihties on French soil 
instead of German, disappointed the longings of multitudes who had set their 
hearts upon a more tangible proof of victory. But no more satisfactory 
demonstration of the triumph of our arms could have been desired than the 
sight of our long khaki columns marching along the winding roads of Ger- 
many that followed the Moselle to Coblenz and across the Rhine. Here was 
the proof of our victory, and it is a pity that the whole of America could not 
have witnessed the momentous occasion that marked our crossing of that 
famous river. At Coblenz, where it was my good fortune to view it, it was an 
event that was typically American in that it occurred without pomp or 
ostentation. Orders were given to cross at 7 A.M., and so, promptly at that 
hour, we crossed. On that morning of December 13th it was still rather dark 
and misty, and looking down from the windows of the hotel that served as 
army headquarters, one could but faintly distinguish the waiting columns at 
the head of the pontoon bridge. There was no flare of bugles, no beating of 
drums or martial music to mark the occasion of their advance. Only the 
brief order to "march" set in motion the stream of American soldiers that for 
days continued to flow across the river and spread out into the arc that 
formed our area of occupation. One needed but to witness the sight of the 
"Stars and Stripes" moving forward above the duH ranks of khaki and shin- 
ing Hke a bright flower agamst the gray, vine-clad hifls of the Rhine to know 
that this was the fulfillment of our dreams, the final curtain which ended our 
mihtary participation in the greatest 
and grimmest of wars. 



PRESS OF 

NORMAN T. A. MUNDER Si CO. 

BALTIMORE, MD. 






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